Becoming more mature is also becoming more complete
Even after 32 years of birth, the "Fire Emblem" series cast by Shozo Kaga is still mentioned from time to time. The world of "Sword and Magic" that it shaped continued to influence the development of many subsequent SRPGs. But if you count the classics of SRPGs, Matsuno's "Royal Knights", it is also an unmissable existence. Compared with the former's "Revenge of the Prince", it focuses more on depicting the ordinary people who have been crushed into dust under the wheel of history that is reeling forward, showing their mental journey. Therefore, even in the past era of SRPG glory, "Royal Knights" has gained a lot of fans with these features.
The people at the Extreme Heart Society Studio, which developed Suzuran Sword, are one of them. However, they have gone further than ordinary fans, not only developing "The Sword of Suzuran: For This Peaceful World" (later known as "The Sword of Suzuran") to pay tribute to "Royal Knights", but also relying on it last year to gain the recognition of Yasuko Matsuno and the real "star chasing success".
Of course, "The Sword of Suzuran" is not a copy of the Royal Knights, but after following its many game mechanics, it spends more energy to shape the plot content and optimize the combat system, create its own characteristics, and increase the interesting lightweight design such as breaking through the level and solving puzzles, hoping to bring players a richer and more diverse game experience.
The overall core of "The Sword of Suzuran" is actually its plot mode "Gate of Destiny". In last year's beta version, "The Sword of Suzuran" showed a lot of special content of the plot mode, and this "up test" can basically make people see the overall framework in its entirety, and it is obvious that it has become more mature.
The plot and battle of "The Sword of Suzuran" always revolve around the theme of "backtracking". In the game, the player will be the leader of the "Sword of Suzuran" mercenary group, constantly circling with the three national forces, and strive to win a glimmer of life for the town and the mercenary group through continuous game and battle in the chaotic world of war. Therefore, in addition to the battle content of turn-based wargames, the game also has content similar to scheduling and solving affairs.
However, although The Sword of Suzuran allows players to freely cultivate and decide on weekly affairs, it also has a variety of dark lines buried in addition to some mandatory events that will occur over time. This leads to the bad end of the "mercenary group demise" if you accidentally miss some key information. When this happens, you must use the "beacon" released by the system at a certain point in time, rewind, start from scratch, restart the transaction, and resolve future events in advance.
At the same time, it is also a BUFF similar to the opening buff in the Roguelike game, different effects will bring you different help to advance the plot in the future, such as choosing the beacon "Rescue of the Long Night", there will be "mysterious people" to help you through a certain stage of difficulties. Due to the limited amount of scripts that can be "backtracked" in this "play test", this effect is more obvious.
In this case, there are also multiple story branches and development lines in the game. For example, in a certain plot, as a dark force expands, the player must choose one of the existing three forces of the Knights, the Kingdom Army and the Papal States to form an alliance. When you sign a contract with one of the forces, the relationship with the other two forces will gradually begin to change subtly. This not only greatly improves the repeatability of the game's story, but also helps players understand the positions of these three forces from multiple perspectives and experience different storylines. Moreover, the follow-up of "The Sword of Suzuran" is estimated to update the two major forces, considering that it adopts a "backtracking" narrative mode and a multi-line story structure, and the content of the overall plot is not rich.
Corresponding to this multi-branched line, script that supports repetitive play is the Roguelike cultivation design of "The Sword of Suzuran". In the game, whether it is the "heroes" who exist as independent characters, or the rest of the "mercenaries" who use the public face, there are different development routes. Moreover, the rewards such as blueprints, skills, and equipment obtained in the game's commission often appear to choose one of the three and choose one of the two - this not only allows the player to choose the most suitable content according to their own training needs, but also greatly broadens the player's decision-making space in battle. They complement the diverse story content and allow players to have a fresh enough game experience every week.
However, these cultivation contents of "The Sword of Suzuran" still have some room for improvement at present. For example, after the end of the week, the player's cultivated character data will be cleared, and the next week will start from scratch, which will more or less weaken the player's desire to repeat the game. Although it will not affect the player's enthusiasm for the game for a short time, when the player is familiar with the plot content, the whole cultivation will slowly begin to become boring. When the surprises of opening a new week can no longer offset the fatigue caused by the same cultivation mode, the player will lose the cultivation goal and lack the motivation to start the game.
In terms of combat systems, SRPGs of the past tend to give the impression of being "difficult". Therefore, in order to allow more people to get started, "Sword of Suzuran" has been optimized in the "strategic content" part of the game, which reduces the threshold for players to get started with the game to a certain extent, for example, it improves the presence of props in the map. In battle, interactive behaviors such as hitting the explosive pill barrel and pushing the rolling stones can get a lot of benefits, and the wooden box that can stand will give the long-range character a high advantage, have a wider perspective, and attack opponents more conveniently. The use of different props not only broadens the decision-making ideas of the game, but also makes the content of the strategy part more flexible.
In addition, "Sword of Suzuran" also follows the design of the Royal Knights to emphasize the difference in terrain height, adding a height attribute to the plot. Character attacks often have different effects due to the difference in height. For example, when the difference between the heights of the two sides is too high, the archer will not be able to successfully attack the enemy because of the obstruction of the plot. This design not only makes the game environment more three-dimensional, but also increases the depth of the game's decision-making. Many times, players need to make real-time decisions according to local conditions, such as how to reasonably allocate climbing skills, such as how to use terrain to kill efficiently - it is also a feature of "Sword of Suzuran". In the various maps of "Sword of Suzuran", the frequency of scenes such as bridges, river banks, and cliffs is not low, and players can often use clever ways to guide enemies to the corresponding places, and use the skills with "knockback" attributes to shoot them down in one fell swoop and complete the terrain killing.
On these bases, "The Sword of Suzuran" also adds a "backtracking" design to the battle, or it can be simply understood as a "repentant chess" function. Players can go back to any turn of any character at any time in the turn of their own action, so that almost all of the player's decisions can be called zero cost and zero risk. Therefore, unless there is a problem with the past cultivation, or the team is completely unreasonable, the player will hardly encounter a level that cannot be played - considering that this is a turn-based warboard game, this is more or less suspected of "opening and hanging". Of course, this lightweight design is useful and necessary, such as for me, a dish and play-loving SRPG bitter hand, anytime, anywhere "regret chess" mechanism, both can effectively reduce my playing costs, but also does not destroy the game experience of other players, why not?
It can be seen that the core design of "backtracking" is the backbone of "The Sword of Suzuran". It not only makes the story content of "Suzuran Sword" richer and the play experience more diverse, but also effectively combines various designs to reduce the difficulty of SRPG's combat decision-making as much as possible without affecting the game strategy, making it suitable for most players.
It can be clearly seen that this time's "Sword of Suzuran" already has a mature creative idea in the plot mode. Perhaps because of this, the Extreme Heart Studio can begin to have a spare time, allocating some of its energy to content outside the script mode.
In this "play test", "The Sword of Suzuran" also added puzzles, challenges and other content with turn-based wargame gameplay as the core, effectively reducing the mental cost of players to open the game. For today's mobile game players, the daily game time is limited, and there is definitely more than one game in their hands, and it is obviously unrealistic for Suzuran Sword to take up most of the player's game time every day. After all, even the national-level game "Happy Fighting Landlord" will add content such as "Endgame Break" to meet the needs of those players with different needs.
These contents, juxtaposed in the main menu with the story mode "Destiny's Gate", are called "The World of Memory" and "The Fool's Journey" respectively. These names are derived from the tarot card's Grand Arcana, and their card face design echoes them, corresponding to the "Fool" that symbolizes the beginning, the "world" that symbolizes the end, and the "Wheel of Destiny" that symbolizes the turning point of the story. With exquisite art, the overall look and feel of the main menu is more mysterious than the plot mode.
Among them, "The Fool's Journey" as the starting point of everything is the basis of the game's fun play. Compared to the battles that appear in the plot, the gameplay here is more "unrestrained" because it introduces a new item "Tarot". In these levels, different tarot cards will appear at specific locations on the map, and when the character is picked, they will get powerful buffs, such as the "Speed of the Chariot" that provides action, which can instantly increase the speed of the character. In addition, there are "King's Power" that increases physical damage, and "Awakening Magic" that increases magic damage.
With the addition of these powerful buffs, enemies naturally appear vulnerable. Therefore, the challenge of "The Fool's Journey" is not how to defeat the enemy, but how to complete the "star rating" and "challenge objective" set by each level. Players think about how to defeat opponents on the board with existing resources and conditions, which is where the content of turn-based wargame battles is characteristic. "Sword of Suzuran" integrates this feature with the content of the level very well, which can not only provide players with different fun, but also indirectly complete the purpose of the game itself to "train" the player - if the player occasionally blocks the level, it may be a good choice to come out and play the "Fool's Journey".
On this basis, "Journey of the Fools" is also divided into puzzle levels of the "endgame" category. These levels often require players to skillfully use one or more of the mechanics of the Suzuran Sword battle system, which is more challenging.
If the "fool's journey" as the starting point represents challenge and training, then the "world of memory" as the end point is a real "practical training". The World of Memories level will only be unlocked after the player has completed the corresponding chapter of The Fool's Journey. What players have to do here is not to complete a certain challenge goal under various restrictions, but to have a lively duel with the enemy in a real way to test the results of their past efforts.
It can be said that these break-through contents that are separated from the plot mode effectively reduce the mental cost of players to open the "Sword of Suzuran". For many players, many times it is not that stand-alone games are not fun, but that they often require a large amount of time and energy, so in the current situation where people master more fragmented time, they invisibly increase the mental cost of players to open the game. This is also the significance of "Sword of Suzuran" to add lightweight content such as level breaking and puzzle solving.
However, judging from the content shown by the "up test", there is still a lot of room for improvement in the content of "The Sword of Suzuran". Among them, the biggest problem lies in the acquisition and cultivation of characters.
"Sword of Suzuran" adds two contents to the main menu, draw cards and cultivate, in order to stimulate players to consume. Unlike the "recruitment" of the story mode, the draw allows players to truly get these characters and devote resources to cultivating them, taking them to the "Fool's Journey", "The World of Memory", or the more challenging "Tianyuan Breakthrough". But the problem is that in order not to let the card draw affect the story mode experience, the "Sword of Suzuran" greatly limits the number of characters that players can carry when entering the game, which leads to many times, players can only fall into the embarrassing situation of "having a character but not using it".
The group portrait narrative mode of "The Sword of Suzuran" can make all kinds of characters look more plump and more charismatic, and then make players willing to spend a sum of money for this role. However, the existing design of "Suzuran Sword" is not enough to satisfy the "True Love Party" who draws cards. For the "strength party" of the card draw, the character cannot be brought into the game at will, and can only be used to fight the level without plot content, and the expectation of drawing the card will only continue to decrease.
In other words, in the content shown by the "Test" of "Suzuran Sword", the biggest problem is not in the quality of the game itself, but in its card drawing experience. How to improve the presence of the character may be a problem that needs to be considered after "The Sword of Suzuran".
It can be said that this "up test" shows a more solid "Sword of Suzuran". Its plot mode has become more complete, and the design reflects its high quality everywhere, and it is obvious that the time and energy spent by the studio on it can be felt.
But the content outside the plot mode of "The Sword of Suzuran" is more like just the beginning. While the puzzle-solving content is interesting, it's still based on turn-based wargames, and while fun, it can only be used to engage players through pure mechanics. On the other hand, at present, "The Sword of Suzuran" restricts the use of card drawing characters, and the content such as "The Fool's Journey" is not rich enough to attract players to cultivate in order to complete the level of drawing characters.
Perhaps it was the early stage of "Sword of Suzuran" that poured more attention into the quality of the game itself, resulting in the existing commercial content being slightly rough. But it is undeniable that the lack of card drawing directly leads to it becoming a knife in the "play test" to split the plot mode and other contents of "The Sword of Suzuran", making the content of the entire "Sword of Suzuran" look less coordinated.
These problems may be solved one by one with the follow-up development of "The Sword of Suzuran". As a player, I look forward to meeting The Sword of Suzuran next time.